Funny LADY - I HATED IT!
I LOVE Funny Girl, it is one of my favorite movies - however I hated Funny Lady (the sequel) and I posted the following on the Funny Lady message board as to my reasons why and I was wondering if anyone had anything to add - I am just finding it difficult to articulate what exactly I hated about Funny Lady. I hated that movie and I was wondering if other people felt the same way. Here is what I wrote:
Ok, I just want to say that I absolutely fell in LOVE with the movie Funny GIRL when it was played on AMC a few months ago - so much so that i have probably watched it 100 times since then. So of course when I found out there was a sequel, I knew I had to see it. So I watched Funny LADY yesterday and my god was that ever painful. First of all, I loved Omar Sharif in the first movie. He was sexy and suave and romantic and yet in Funny Lady (made only 7 years later) he looks like an old man!! What was so great about him in the first movie is completely gone in this film. I mean I understand that probably helps the movie b/c now Fanny sees that they man she fell in love with before was not a real man but someone who put on a sense of sexiness and security to really coverup his insecurity, however it was painful to see OMar Sharif again in this movie.
Then you have Fanny Brice - now again, I understand that this movie is supposed to have an older, wiser more sopisticated Fanny, however, what happened to that lovable character from Funny Girl? Gone are the cute jokes and expressions and here we have a diva - that was probably done on purpose to show you how Fanny is now an established star, etc but she is no longer lovable and you are no longer rooting for her like you did in Funny GIRL.
James Caan was good but obviously him and the Fanny Brice character do not suit each other - and why the heck would Fanny marry Billy Rose anyway, the lead up to that proposal was weird b/c you never even saw them in a true romance, you just knew they had some attraction to each other.
I guess they wanted to make Funny Lady a more realistic movie than Funny Girl with less romance and fantasy but what was so amazing about Funny Girl WAS the whirl wind romance and passion and chemistry between Sharif and Streisand.
Funny Lady lacks everything - it lacks chemistry and passion and true romance and true laughs and seriously, everytime I saw Sharif and Streisand on the screen together it made me cringe. In those scenes between Nick and Fanny, they literally destroy everything that was magical between them in Funny Girl. I mean, Fanny saying that all she fell in love with was Nick's seven tooth brushes and his monogrammed towels (ie the suave persona that she is accusing Nick of faking in Funny Girl?) I mean come on!! NIck in Funny Girl was the real Nick and she did love him and he did love her. But in Funny Lady, they discount their courtship and marriage into nothing but a sham between two people who never belonged together and Fanny turns Nick into an uncaring, money hungry, absentee father who was nothing but a fake. However in the first movie they DID belong together - that was what was so magical! Nick and Fanny from different sides of the tracks, falling in love and defying the odds and Fanny wanting to stick with Nick no matter what. In Funny Lady, that was not the real Nick Arnstein - he was sweet and in love with Fanny in Funny Girl - all it was, was the fact that his pride had taken a beating after he started to "lose his poker face".
Funny Girl was remarkable because you hads the fantasy element plus the reality hitting at the end of the movie, but it still never lost its sense of romance and fairy tale. But Funny LADY has neither. I am trying with all my might to forget about this movie and maintain the image I have of Nick and Fanny from the first movie and leave it at that. I do not want to think of an aging Fanny and Nick, bitter and with all their magic gone - instead I want to think of them as young and sexy and in love.
It is sort of like the last Godfather movie. Godfather I and II were remarkable, then in 1989/1990, over 15 years after the second Godfather film, they decide to make another one and all you have is an old Al Pacino and an old Diane Keaton, bumbling along, reminiscing their past and discussing why they did things and analysing things and saying how they have changed, etc etc and all the viewer can go is cringe at Godfather III because it completely destroys everything you loved about the first two films and their characters. As with Funny Lady - its a pointless film - no reminiscing of Funny Girl is needed - no explanation or change of heart,etc is needed. Instead, Funny Girl, although it ended with Nick leaving and Fanny still loving him, is enough and it should have have been left at that.